Insight from the Wall Street Journal

Mr. Obama's great political talent has been his knack for granting his admirers permission to think highly of themselves for thinking highly of him.

The Left and the Tragedy of the Commons

There is a limit to how much grass you can harvest from a field each year. Remove more than that, and what remains doesn't capture enough light to sustain even its former rate. If several farmers want to use the field for their herds to graze, a problem occurs when the field cannot produce enough for all the herds: Each individual farmer wants to get his dibs in first, and the decline accelerates. Similar problems happen whenever a resource renews itself at a rate that depends on the previous quantity: Consume too much, and the amount available for the future declines.

We've seen such problems in situations ranging from lobster fishing in New England to cork harvesting in Portugal. The only solution I know to such problems is for all parties to agree on limits, which they then enforce.

The political left normally prides itself on recognizing such situations. For example, the whole "climate change" movement is based on the notion that there is a limit to how much additional carbon dioxide the earth can tolerate per unit time. I've seen similar arguments about logging, oil, and other natural resources.

Here's what I don't get. Change "farmer" to "government program," "field" to "economy," and "grass" to "GDP," and the analogy holds: There is a limit to how much a government can "harvest" in the form of taxes. If each government program tries to get its dibs in, the result will stifle the economy to the point where less is available overall. The only solution I can think of to such problems is for everyone to agree to limit the total amount of money the government consumes.

This analogy seems flagrantly obvious to me. So how come it is the Right that is making it, not the Left? The only reason I can think of is that for carbon dioxide, logging, fishing, and so on, the solution involves making government larger, and for the government problem, the solution involves making it smaller. In other words, the Left doesn't really care about the tragedy of the commons at all; they're just using it as an excuse for enlarging government, and they don't notice the cases when their own arguments favor making government smaller.

I'm afraid that this isn't a particularly charitable view, but I can't think of an alternative.